What If School Was More Like This?

I ran across this video a couple of weeks ago and it has been rolling around my head ever since.  I love its wordless, captivating, 75 second message - it's been the perfect accelerant to the cognitive kindling I've been trying to spark for weeks now.  As summer officially draws to a close for me this week, I've been trying to light a fire under the mountain of to-do lists that I keep making for myself, and I think this might just be what the doctor ordered.


LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Every time I watch it, I think... "what if school was more like this?" What if?

What if every time we created an environment/opportunity for students we were guided by the desire to make magic; to create an experience our students will never forget; to create learning that is:

• active


• participatory


• messy


• inquisitive


• authentic


• joyful

 What if?

Obviously, we can't travel the 38 thousand miles, or to the 11 countries, it took to create this video as we tackle a new year with our students.  And clearly, it's tough to make magic on a fixed schedule, with no assistant, no budget and [insert obstacle here]. But, frankly, the alternative strikes me as quite a bit harder to swallow.

When I was a first year teacher, my mentor teacher asked me what I thought about giving my students the opportunity to veer away from the whole class novel in favor of choosing their own reading.  I can remember distinctly sitting on the sofa in the back of my room and saying, "I don't think I can do that."  Without judgement, she simply said, "Ok. Let's talk about what you can do, then."  It would be years before I got to the point where I could give up a prescribed common text, but her wisdom has stuck with me.

Recently, Buffy Hamilton has been speaking and writing about enchantment as a force for learning in the library and I believe this a branch from that same tree.  Her message of tapping into student passions as a means of fueling learning is one that resonates deeply with me.  That said, while I may not be able to make every learning experience look like the ones in the video or fill every lesson with enchantment, I'm definitely ready to start thinking about what I can do.

Collaboration: Nourishment for the Professional Soul

Like a lot of teachers/librarians who benefit from having "summer's off," I always head back to school earlier than I should.  We don't officially start back until mid-August, but I've spent the last couple of days there trying to shift my brain back into school mode.  Time at school without other teachers and students can be productive because while I still run around like a madwoman on those days, I get to be the sole director of that madness. Truly, as someone who sometimes thinks "rolling with the punches" should be listed at the top of her job description, the idea of working uninterrupted can be absolutely intoxicating.  However, it doesn't take long before the work I do during those days of solitude reveals itself to be tedious and, ultimately, unsatisfying.  Saying it's too quiet may seem like a throw away remark, but really it's hitting the nail on the head, because the noise we make in the library is evidence of the collaborative relationships that make our work so meaningful.

In her AMAZING Ted-style talk at ISTE this year, (I'm still in mourning that I wasn't there), Buffy Hamilton talked about creating enchantment for our patrons through the relationships we build with them.  She rightfully pointed out that one of the problems libraries face in our efforts to rebrand ourselves is the fact that we are so often associated with things (be it books, databases or eReaders) instead of people and relationships.  (I believe we contribute to this problem in a number of ways, but that's a post of a different color).

In my experience, "collaboration" is a term that librarians most often toss around to describe the work we do with classroom teachers.  However, I think we sometimes leave out the other important collaborations we share with students and with each other.  Perhaps we're all so worried about defending our jobs that we tend to focus on the collaborations that can most easily be tied to student achievement.  Or maybe it's because those "other" collaborations are so fulfilling, so nourishing to our professional souls that they seem too luxurious or frivolous to be really valuable. Hmmmm.  Something to chew on, certainly.

Anyway, a few of these other collaborations have recently resulted in some products that I wanted to share.

First, although  I've posted this before, I neglected to point out that one of the presentations I did for the Teaching Fellows Conference was actually the product of a collaboration between me and a former student.  Several of the photographs I used in this presentation are hers - used not only with permission but with discussion before and after about how and why they could be, and ultimately were, impactful. While I'm glad that this provided her with the chance to extend the reach of her work, I am absolutely in love with the notion of today's students helping to shape the practice of tomorrow's teachers.

Bibliotherapy 2.0

Secondly, while I didn't work on this video, I got to see a sneak preview of it at the P21 institute last month.  On the face of it, it's a delightful piece about encouraging kids to collaborate, communicate, think critically and create.  However, what makes it even more special to me is the knowledge that the product itself is the result of a collaboration between some unlikely co-conspirators in the #edreform revolution.  Educators, politicians, business and non profit leaders all teamed up with the folks at FableVision to make this happen. Again, I am smitten by the knowledge that this product couldn't have been created without the very ideals it promotes.  Plus, its one size does NOT fit all message is just lovely.  Also, just as an FYI, there's a downloadable poster that accompanies this video here.

Finally, I was absolutely knocked for a loop last week when so many people asked if they could share the flyer I made about what teachers/administrators should expect from their school librarians.  But my humbled shock morphed into pure inspiration when Donna Baumbach transformed the flyer into this amazing collaborative document using the tool ThingLink.   I am amazed.  Not only are people sharing some amazing resources/work/examples, but now I simply can't wait to put ThingLink to work in my library.



I end this post with the same feeling I have each year when a new school year approaches:  abuzz with ideas.  Ideas that I wouldn't have had, had I not indulged in the frivolity of collaboration.